The World Wide Web provides an arena for the exchange of vast amounts of information from an increasingly diverse set of individuals. From a PhD candidate's doctoral dissertation to a microblogger's update on their current wardrobe selection, different types of information can be found on the World Wide Web from people having a range of different backgrounds. Websites like youtube.com, associatedcontent.com, wikipedia.org, myspace.com, etc. allow users to submit content (e.g., text, images, videos) for public consumption, social networking, or for compensation. The number of individuals providing content to these sites and the number of individuals accessing this content show that people or workers are not only willing to provide content for others to view, but are also interested in providing content to be part of a network or in exchange for compensation.
Content distributors or requestors can encourage or hire content contributors or workers to provide content by compensating and/or incenting the content contributors for their content (i.e. crowdsourcing). Crowdsourcing is a very real and important business idea. Definitions and terms vary, but the basic idea is to tap into the collective intelligence (i.e. collective resources) of the public at large to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider. Yet labor acquisition on a mass scale is only a narrow part of crowdsourcing's appeal. More importantly, it enables managers to expand the size of their talent pool while also gaining deeper insight into what customers really want. Crowdsourcing has emerged over last few years as an important labor pool for a variety of tasks, for example, from digitization, image labeling, user studies, natural language tasks, machine translation evaluation, and EDA simulation, to big innovation contests conducted by companies such as Netflix and Innocentive.
Crowdsourcing is a new mode of organizing work which allows individuals to work and potentially earn money without the need for physical co-location, employment contracts, or even an established identity. Internet based online marketplaces such as, for example, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) allows companies or individuals (requesters) to post jobs for people (workers) to complete them for relatively small amounts of money. Large numbers of people can participate in such crowdsourcing activities in these marketplaces. There were over 100,000 registered workers on AMT in 2007 and the numbers have increased many folds since then, as the demographics have changed significantly. In general most workers spend a day or less per week working on Amazon Mechanical Turk (as one illustrative example), and tend to complete 20-100 tasks per week at their free time to earn small amount of money (typically less than $20 per week). Of course, there are a few workers that devote a significant amount of time and effort, completing thousands of tasks, and generating a respectable income of more than $1000/month.